


The Girl in the High Castle

by Mosca



Series: Five Worlds Without Shrimp [1]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 11:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/773799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mosca/pseuds/Mosca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's only a little bit the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Girl in the High Castle

**Author's Note:**

> I originally posted this to my Livejournal in May 2005.
> 
> Distraction, k, and Biogeekgrrl beta read this at various stages. It came out of a workshop at 2004 Writercon led by Liz Marcs.
> 
> The stories in "Five Worlds Without Shrimp" are all set in different universes, and each one stands alone. Each imagines a world in which the events of AtS are all about the journey of a secondary character.

Fred watches Angel's last battle through the sunproof glass. He defeats the things with torches and crossbows, the dragons that breathe fire. She knew he would. He was always good at that. He rises in a plume of dust, the color of worn black denim. Say goodbye to the last of the old-fashioned heroes.

"Goodbye," says Illyria, who is still grasping irony. It is one of those times when she looks at his face and remembers who he isn't anymore. The parasitic god is so literal-minded. Its host only understood the things he could interpret. He used to look in her eyes like he was about to write a treatise on the metaphor of her kiss. 

Illyria makes her feel like she's bit down too hard on an ice cube. This office, her work, the act of taking sides: the nerve endings in her teeth all ache. "Everything left is fragile," Illyria says. "You pulverize the demons." He presses one blue hand into the window glass, and the telescoping charm shifts the view so they are looking out at the ocean. "This world used to be adamantine."

She hates Illyria's voice because she used to love it, the way it turned every word into a soliloquy, a bedtime story. Now it gives her that ice cube feeling. She interrupts him to keep him from talking. "He saved me once," she says. "Angel. More than once."

"Are you romanticizing him," Illyria says, "because you're mourning?" 

The first emotion that Illyria learned about was mourning. He watched everyone go through the five stages of grief. Angel lingered on anger. Fred got hers out of the way fast: Knox never saw her coming.

It's why the Senior Partners promoted her. They think she has spunk. Marcus likes to remind her of that. Another shell around something that isn't a man. She's glad she never knew him, if there was a him to know before he became what he is. It's easier than Charles in his business suits, singing light opera, making a dream of the times when he took her out for In & Out burgers at midnight and said she was his Princess Buttercup. He didn't have the grace to change his color. He is a perfect gentleman, and she wishes she had more rage.

Angel had enough for all of them, blaming in every direction, saving the world while she held the line. He never understood survival tactics, because all he did was survive. Every time he tortured or rescued, it was a blind act of self-preservation. There was no other way to explain his wacky wars on the demon underworld when the demon underworld was the glue that held the light together. Already, she is getting phone calls from the places where the cracks are showing. That's how she knew he'd killed the whole Circle of the Black Thorn. Harmony put all those terrified clients on the line so Fred could promise them swift and total order. 

The Partners like that she's good at pacifying clients. They're partial to Texans. Good auras for breeding anti-heroes, Lorne said once. "I'm no anti-hero," she said then, and she says it again, because she couldn't stop Angel. That should be what anti-heroes do: stop heroes. But that's not her purpose, as it's not the firm's purpose. They're not here to win the war; they're here to hold the line, to gain the advantage, to put the right things in the wrong shells and fight the laws of thermodynamics.

She doesn't remember where she found her resistance, her refusal, the round "no" on her lips when Angel announced his mission. Her lips retained that circle when Gunn and Lorne stood behind her. "We'll be fine, kiddo," Lorne said when the doors slammed. "We'll be fabulous." He crooned Patsy Cline, and he was whole, same Lorne as ever, and she felt almost safe, almost strong.

She shouldn't have been surprised that Lorne was more loyal to her than to Angel. His voice lifts the old Pylean collar from her throat. It was her responsibility as his friend to give him back his memories, but he will die believing he didn't deserve that kindness. He is a demon, and the good doesn't build in him unless people with souls remember what he's done.

She came back from Cyvus Vail's lair with no evidence except Illyria's demanding questions. Her memory raced with lies that wanted to overrun events that she remembered sideways. She sang to Lorne to sort them. But when she closed her mouth on the last line of "Goodbye, Earl," he said, "Keep going. Please."

She exhausted every country song she knew the words to, and he begged her to keep singing. She was hoarse and running out of Christmas carols when he let her fall into his arms. "Hello, stranger," he said. "You were quite the action hero in your other life." He sounded like he was straining to be cheerful. She likes to think that he went back to his condo and erupted in anger, but he probably buried the bitterness, let it seethe. Pylea makes a person so angry that rage is impossible to expel.

"I didn't have a choice," she said.

"You're just too hard to delude," he said.

It's not the super power she would have picked, but the whole point of power is its randomness. She doesn't want to be the one who gets to see Angel turn to dust. Or the one who watches Spike walk away alone. He's walking toward Wolfram & Hart's headquarters. He could be headed anywhere—anywhere west of the Hyperion—but she has to wonder if she'll take him in again.

She'd believed he would stand behind her. She'd thought he loved her more than he loved Angel. She was right about the love and wrong about how much it mattered. "I have to fight the good fight," Spike said. "Last chance at redemption, you know. Hard to pass that up. Sorry." She didn't have a chance to tell him it was the wrong fight, and anyway, he didn't care what became of the world as long as he came out ahead.

She will take him back; she will take them all back; she will do it again and again and she is less and less sure that she will stop after only a lifetime. "What makes you think you're human anymore, either?" Marcus said. He'd startled her, coming from behind while she'd watched Illyria poke a paper shredder and tried not to mourn in public.

She collected her nail clippings and the hair from her comb, drew her own blood, and failed to find any measurable change. But not all change is measurable. Under a microscope, Marcus is human, too. He put his eyelash in her hand and told her to make a wish.

She wishes she hadn't sent the sarcophagus up to Wesley's department without examining it first. She wishes that one of his assistants had opened it. Knox said it was meant for her. She knows it couldn't have been, not in the grand scheme, or it _would_ be her with the blue hair and the obliterated soul. But she likes to believe in free will, multiple predictable outcomes, a world governed by laws and not destinies. 

It's what she was exercising when she dipped Wesley's favorite dagger in enchanted poison, when she pressed her mourning lips into Knox's, when she shoved the knife into Knox's carotid artery and let his blood soak her shirt. By the time she had finished burning her shirt and casting a spell to purify the dagger, Wes had died.

She keeps the dagger in a desk drawer for emergencies. Sometimes, she runs her thumb down the blade and thinks she can hear Wesley's voice. Not Illyria's birdlike non-sequitur tics, but whatever is left of Wes in the world. Once, Illyria offered her a parody of Wes's smile, thinking it would calm her, but his eyes were so empty that her lip trembled and she thought she could taste poison.

She contained it like she always did. Wes forbade her to cry for him. He locked himself in his apartment; he locked her out. "Find a cure," he said. "Whether you find it or not, there's no nobility in your watching me die."

"I love you," she said, pounding her fists on the door.

"Then save me," he said. "Remember me."

She remembers him twice over. She fell in love with the loyal revision, but she prefers the original. He was trying to save them all from themselves. It's nobler to do that than to save everyone else from the things that go bump in the night.

If you eliminate all the bumps, there is nothing but silence. And no friction, no stopping, everything propelled at an intractably consistent velocity until it hits a wall and shatters in all directions. When asked, she tells people that's what Wolfram & Hart is fighting against. They are the headwinds and tailwinds, the bumps in the road. It seems to confuse people more, but when she tries to translate the metaphor from elementary physics to anything else, it becomes less comfortable and less elegant. Diluted. But she's used to diluting herself for others, translating equations and subatomic truths into words that don't wrap all the way around them.

There are no words for memories that seem tangible and ready though they're fabricated, and definitely no words for memories that feel like rusted dreams but must be true. If she called her implanted memories the centrifugal ones, imaginary forces that you can feel anyway, she'd just have to dilute.

She concentrates the memories instead. She forgot all about running through the streets of LA, bruised and hounded. Gunn wasn't the one with the crossbow, opening portals, bled dry of mercy. She wasn't the conscience on his shoulder; it was the other way around. Angel took away her most courageous moments and replaced them with domesticity. He erased her propensity for breaking spells.

It's what a scientist does: replaces myth with reproducible reality. She had to be the one to break that box.

After Connor killed Sahjahn, he paused to squeeze Fred's hand. "It's going to be so much harder now," she said.

"What am I supposed to do?" he said. He stared at the weapon in his hand. "Am I supposed to do this? Because I don't think—I don't think I want to do this."

"Go back to Stanford," she said. "Learn stuff."

"You think?" he said. "Because I was _good_. I was good at... I _killed_ that."

"So what?" she said.

"So _what_? So maybe this is what I'm supposed to be doing, whether I want to or not. Maybe this other life is just a lie that I can't... live." He glanced over at Angel.

When she stared back at him, time moved slowly. "Did you like it? Really. Did you have a good time killing demons? Because that? That's just surviving," she said. "That's what you do because you live in a hell dimension where you wear whatever you can kill." She put her hands on his shoulders. "This is not for you."

She hasn't seen Connor since, but he e-mails her from Stanford to let her know he's doing well. He's taking physics this semester, and sometimes he asks her questions. She is proud of him and wonders if anyone else knows how to be proud of him in the same way. Angel wants him to be normal and happy, as if those words are interchangeable or even possible for a kid like Connor. Fred wants him to hang onto his sight, his memories that must war in him worse than she can fathom, to learn the options before he hurls himself at a mission.

"They've gotten to you," Angel said when she refused to follow him into battle. "Wolfram and Hart has _twisted_ you, made you blind to the evil—"

"There's always evil," Fred said. "Kill some of it, and it makes more. And this is... good evil. Evil that prevents _worse_ evil from getting through and—and—" 

"Crushing you like the worms you are," Illyria said. Behind him, Gunn guffawed.

It relieves Fred to see that Gunn has his sense of humor back. For a while, it was all obscure legal puns and the kind of good-natured unfunniness that soulless men in suits use to break the ice at the beginnings of meetings. Looking at him nauseated her. 

Her stomach ached every time she worked on the memory potion she invented to break his spell. Weary from research and the energy drain of small magics, she chased Pepto Bismol with Mountain Dew while Illyria twittered over her shoulder. "Let him suffer in his putrid ignorance," Illyria commanded, but that made Fred sicker than the Charles who acted like the love he'd felt for her hadn't counted.

She festooned the potion bottle with a purple ribbon and presented it to Gunn. "Drink it now," she said, folding her arms.

He untied the ribbon and unscrewed the cap to sniff inside. "What is it?" he said.

"An antidote," she said. He hesitated, and she added, "Trust me."

He looked at the bottle and then at her, and she realized that she'd given him the one instruction that he hadn't needed. He took a sip, and his eyes went wide like the wind was pushing him into traffic. "I _knew_ I should have taken the blue pill," he said. She was so pleased to have him back that she surprised his cheek with a kiss.

"Don't," he said. "I don't _know_ you."

He will be in his office now, cleaning up the legal disaster that crops up when an entire coalition of powerful demons gets killed in one day. He has been gentler lately, more and more as his memories settle in. He has forgiven himself, or he has forgiven her.

If he has, he's a step ahead of her. The wind has scattered Angel by now.

Angel had every chance to see that he was losing her. She saw it herself in the mirror, the way her mouth had hardened and her eyes had chilled. She rambled about equations and threw out her Sharpies so she wouldn't be tempted to write on the walls. But he expected sweet agreeable Fred, and that's all he perceived in her, like he'd cast a glamour on her and was the only one who wound up fooled.

The phone rings. Fred decides not to answer it, but Illyria demands that she put an end to the racket. "Boss?" Harmony says, her voice quivering. "Boss. It's weird to call you that. Can I, like, call you Fred, even though it's against company policy?"

Wolfram and Hart's corporate policy is a collection of loosely phrased and seldom heeded guidelines, and Marcus rolls his eyes when Fred tries to adhere to them. "Do you think the Partners chose you because they wanted someone who'd follow their rules?" he said. He winced as soon as he closed his mouth, punished for frankness. Once in a while, she starts to believe he's most loyal to her, and those are the times when the Partners dig their claws into his belly.

He probably thinks that's why she won't sleep with him. As if he doesn't know as well as she does that her body and her brain are her only collateral. "Have it your way, Virgin Queen," Lorne said last night, when she told him she'd turned Marcus down for a drink.

She'd just gotten off the phone with Connor. Angel had told him to come down to LA, only the latest of his cryptic demands on a kid who had four hard courses and a social life to worry about. "He said he just wants to give me something," Connor said. "Is it the apocalypse, or just something else I'm supposed to kill?"

"The apocalypse," Fred said, "but it's only a little one. They won't even feel it in Orange County." She stacked the lies like nesting dolls and wished her stomach would ache, but she felt hollowed out. She wonders what the Partners plan to fill that hollow with.

"Boss. Fred." Harmony is good at the present tenses of secretarial work, instants so small that the Uncertainty Principle is a pressing consideration. "Spike's in the lobby. Security wants to know what you want them to do with him. Should I patch them through?"

"Tell them I'll be right down," Fred says. Illyria peels his hands from the windowpane like he wants to tag along. "Stay here," Fred says. "Don't... destroy anything major."

"My power has diminished," Illyria says, "and there remains little worth destroying."

Fred has already destroyed everything worth saving. She feels in her fingers the encroachment of uncertainty. Angel was certain; he had a talent for it. He had the mission. She has an office building full of shells. If she'd known that everyone she loved would turn into paper dolls, she wouldn't have argued. She would have put on her meekest face and been the girl they all fell in love with. But by the time she wanted it back, she'd torn it off and burned it.

She had no face to confront Angel with except the one with the severe lines. "You erased us," she said, digging the stake into the breast pocket of his shirt. "Is that really who you wanted me to be?"

"It's who you are," Angel said. "It's who I thought—"

"You weren't paying attention," she said. She felt ridiculous and lunatic with her fist sweating around the stake. She let it fall. "You can't just kill everything you don't like. It's not safe."

"They've gotten to you," Angel said.

They can have her. She'd rather be a scientist than a hero. It's not her fault she gravitates toward equilibria, weighs risks, quiets her emotions when they bicker with logic. She descends the last few steps. "Did you win?" she asks Spike.

"Nope," he says. "Stop asking questions you already bloody know the answers to."

So she doesn't ask him if he needs a shower and a mug of room-temperature pig's blood, the consolation prizes of heroism from the side that always wins. Wins because it refuses to play fair or to play at all. She's the captain of the winning team. They can pin the blue ribbon to the lapel of her twinset, because they have gotten to her and they have got her, and she may not be an ancient god-king but she can turn souls to dust, she can break spells, she can watch and console. She can hang onto the only laws that govern: inertia and entropy, randomness and relativity, reproducibility and elegance.


End file.
